Aero L-39 Albatros

By Andrew Herd (14 September 2001)

few months back, I wrote that this had been a vintage year for flight simulation. FS2000 may be one of the most maligned versions of Flight Simulator ever released, it may be buggy, and it has been outclassed by competing products with far shorter pedigrees, but there is no question that it has inspired the development of a new generation of add-on aircraft that have taken us several stages nearer towards the look and feel of the real thing. In a comparatively short space of time we have had the Wilco 767 PIC, the FlightOne/DreamFleet 737, the Phoenix 747 and 777 and several excellent general aviation planes, but the one thing FS2000 has been missing until now is military aircraft that handle like the real thing.

There are one or two honourable exceptions to the statement above, but while visual models of fighter aircraft have come on by leaps and bounds, the same can't be said for their .air files, which commonly fail to convey the challenge of flying the originals. If jet fighters weren't difficult to fly, the failure rates on training programs wouldn't run at the level they do - and the one common factor linking the majority of military sims is that the balance of their handling qualities veers too near to the arcade and too far away from reality.

So it was with some reluctance that I agreed to review the Captain Simulators' L-39 Albatros. For a start, I had never heard of the developers. Captain Simulators? Who are they? When I asked, I learned that they are a group of air force pilots, professional aerodynamics engineers, programmers and artists based in the Ukraine, Russia and Canada, but their location doesn't really matter, because the one talent they definitely share is the ability to design military aircraft sims that take your breath away. If the Albatros is anything to go by, then this group will turn the world of flight simulation upside down.

The Aero L-39 may be unfamiliar to readers, but it is one of the most popular jet trainers in the world, with over 2,250 examples delivered. With a gross weight of 10,000 pounds, it is capable of Mach 0.8 and it shares enough of the characteristics of modern single engined fighters that in real life nobody could just jump into the real thing and hope to fly it. For all that it is only 40 feet long, the Albatros is a powerful plane, with a service ceiling of 40,000 feet, and an initial rate of climb of over 4000 feet per minute, yet it can operate off a 2000 foot paved runway. With this power comes a certain amount of complexity, and even rated pilots need some refreshing on the type after a couple of months away from it. What Captain Simulators have done is to produce a procedural simulator of the aircraft that not only handles about as close to the real thing as FS2000 will allow, but which works just like the original. The cockpit is full of switches, and very few of them are there as decorations - get the startup sequence wrong and you will be stuck cursing on the pavement just like I was. Get it right and I guarantee you will not look at Flight Simulator the same way ever again.

I asked Alex Pogensky, the TLK-39 Project Manager at Captain Simulators, why they chose to go for a jet trainer when everyone else in the flightsim development world is beating a path to Boeing's door. He told me, "We do respect airliners and stuff - my last type in the Air Force was a Tupolev-134 VIP - but people want to enjoy practicing jet aerobatics and combat manoeuvering, so..." What he doesn't say is that the simulation you see here was originally developed to train Ukrainian Air Force pilots, and the sim has been shaped by people with thousands of hours experience on the type. It shows.

The visual model is exceptional. Everything is animated, with a hinged canopy, rotating wheels, landing gear, wheel nacelle covers, elevators, ailerons, rudder, double slotted flaps, air brakes, and even the landing gear position indicators. The artwork is fantastic, with superb textures, a detailed 3D cockpit interior with pilot; and to cap it all, you get two planes, a Ukrainian AF trainer, and a Soviet Air Force L-39C model armed with UB-16 rocket containers. There is a custom sound set recorded from an AI-25TL turbofan and cockpit sounds to go with it, and if that isn't enough, there is full internal and external lighting, including landing gear mounted position control lights.

Very nice, but there have been other military sims with visual models that are nearly as good. Now let's step into the cockpit. If you are used to western general aviation planes it will look very different to the layouts you are used to seeing. For a start, all the legends on the panel are in Russian, just like the original. Take a look around... every single control is there, 99% of them in working order, and you had better be grateful for the pop-up labels, because this has a full eastern European instrument set, and there isn't a single default instrument in sight. So you had better start reading the checklist, because without it, we ain't gonna be going anywhere.

Firing up the engine isn't complicated, in fact it only involves five different steps, but your timing needs to be good, or you won't light the turbofan. Access the "panel down" view to do this, as in the screen shot. It took me five or six goes before I finally understood that pressing the engine button before the turbine had been running ten seconds, and before the yellow turbo light had been on a couple of seconds, would always result in an aborted start.

With the engine running, you can work your way through the rest of the checklist, firing up all the systems one by one. You can actually fly the plane if you don't do this, but not for long. For instance, if the battery, generators, 115V converter and ADI-RMI switches aren't on, the attitude indicator doesn't work, and believe me, you definitely need it. Fortunately the check list only runs to a couple of pages of pdf, and once you are familiar with the panel, it only takes two minutes to work through it, but be prepared to make some investment of time understanding where all the controls and switches are. This ain't the default 182, it was designed to train real pilots, and it doesn't make any concessions to the "select aircraft and go" school. Fortunately, the developers have included a very smart cockpit guide with the download, and fifteen minutes study should have you up and running.

Okay, so now we are ready taxi to the runway. Here the one and only practical problem with the sim reveals itself, which is that you can't steer it on the ground at low speeds with a yoke or joystick. While this might be inconvenient, it is the way things work in real life, where even the lowliest Cessna has to be taxied using the pedals. Make sure you have the canopy shut - the lettering on the left internal coaming says 'Do not move the canopy vertically while locks open,' by the way, so don't try it.

Work your way through the before taxi checklist, and then we are ready to rock and roll. The take-off run is about fifteen hundred feet, so once you are at the threshold, apply the brakes, turn on the landing lights, slave the compass to the gyro, and tighten your belt one last time, Now you can push the throttle right to the max, start the chronometer, release the brakes and feel the AI-25TL spool up. At 150 km/h (the airspeed indicator is marked in hundreds of kilometres per hour), rotate, and the Albatros will unstick shortly afterwards.

How does it feel? You are probably thinking the same thing I did, right now. Unstable is the first word that came into my mind - the whole flight model reminding me of trying to keep a ball bearing balanced on top of a football - but this is how it should be. This plane has a wingspan a couple of feet less than a Cessna 152, but several hundred times the thrust, and you are made very well aware of this in the sim, which has realism stamped all over it. The Albatros will climb to 16000 feet in five minutes, its rate of roll is terrifying, and my strong advice is not to stall it anywhere near the ground, because it designed as a stepping stone to fast jets, not for taking a PPL - so a full recovery can use up a lot of altitude. But boy, is it fun to fly. My dislike of military sims evaporated in the first thirty seconds I had the L-39 in the air. If only they all handled like this.

Once you have recovered from the excitement of piloting this showpiece of simulation skills, take a look around - and listen. The sound set is absolutely fantastic; with just enough wind roar to make me want to upgrade my speaker set, and nicely progressive engine whine. The nervous flight model becomes fun after only a few minutes, and then, far too soon, it is time to land.

It took me six attempts to get it in the first time I tried. I thought I had gotten used to Flight Simulator after all these years, but the L-39 opened up a whole new world for me on approach, which is where I began to really appreciate the depths of this simulation. It pays to line up about eight to ten miles out (I should have tried the next state) at around 600 metres (2000 feet). Cut the throttle to 80%, and when the airspeed falls to 330 km/h drop the gear. At 280 km/h, select flaps 25, retrim, check the airspeed is holding up at 280 and switch on the landing lights so that the people on the ground know to fetch the crash truck and the medics. At the outer marker, ease back to 260 km/h, drop full flaps and retrim. Now you gotta really concentrate, because you have to fly this one right onto the runway - chop the throttle too high and you will stall and die. At the inner marker, back off power again to 230 km/h, which seems terrifyingly fast, but is as slow as you can realistically afford to go, and ease her in. If you get down first time, you are an expert; if not, join the club.

I think the last word belongs to Alex Pogensky. 'Although it is difficult to learn to fly, the L-39 was the easiest jet type to fly in our air force. Do you know what's the landing speed of MiG-21 was? Right, 360 km/h over the inner marker and about 300 km/h on touchdown...that would be a great challenge for serious FS enthusiasts. Soviet pilots used to say: "If you can land a 21 - you can land anything." Frankly, there was an even more difficult bird to land - the Su-15 ..... but that's maybe for later. For now we are proud to release the L-39.'

The minimum system requirements are a Pentium II-400, 64 Mb of RAM and a 16 Mb 3D video card, but a Pentium III-500 with 128 Mb of RAM and a 32 Mb 3D video card is recommended. Any screen resolution from 800x600 to 1600x1200 should work.

There is one more thing to say. If the L-39 is well received - and I think it is the best add-on I have ever seen for FS2000 - then the developers will look at producing more releases. Buy this one, and when you have recovered from the experience - and I promise you, it will change the way you think about Flight Simulator - visit this link and tell Captain Simulations what you would like them to tackle next. For more info on the TLK-39C, screen shots and pre-ordering please visit the web site.